Quotes About American

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

We need American sources of resources, we need American energy, brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.

If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him: It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time!

Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them. Secondly, I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities - a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.

We need to build a beautiful granite and bronze monument in our nation's capital to honor American heroes, unsung American heroes. And those unsung American heroes are the rich.

When African-American police officers involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?

The foreign audiences are somewhat surprised and happy to find an American film that asks questions about American culture. There's a certain kind of cultural imperialism that we practice. Our films penetrate every market in the world. I have seen and have had people reflect to me, maybe not in so many words or specifically, but I get the subtext of it - they're somewhat charmed and surprised and happy to see an American film reflect on our culture. Because they see other cultures reflect on our culture but they don't see US culture reflecting on itself in quite the same way.

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.

I think that Hillary Clinton has an appreciation that American power needs to be put in the service of American values, which is an American tradition and a pretty good one, and I think she was willing to do that.

What we do know is that the planet is going from 7 billion people today to 9 billion. More people want to live like us, drive American- size cars, live in an American-size home, and eat American-size Big Macs. What does that mean? It means that energy demand is going to be going up.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

The Democratic Party represents the American brain, and the Republicans represent not the American heart, or soul, but the American gut. The argument between brain and bowel, everywhere else in the Free World, has been decided long ago in favor of brain. But Americans still - it still divides the nation, this question, here in America.

But you have to understand, American democracy is not like the system you have. We're not an ocean liner that sails across the ocean from point A to point B at 30 knots. That's not American democracy. American democracy is kind of like a life raft that bobs around the ocean all the time. Your feet are always wet. Winds are always blowing. You're cold. You're wet. You're uncomfortable -- but you never sink.

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.

My favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, "We're not going to harm you. We're American soldiers."

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.

...President [Bush] believes that [high-energy consumption] is an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.

The American people want us to stop spending. And so let's just give them some certainty. Let's extend the tax - the existing tax cuts. And then let's give some more tax breaks to small businesses and large. And then maybe the American people will have some confidence.

I don't know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn't feel like a line to me. You know, it felt like him reverting back to what was in his bones and that's, you know, optimism and a deep belief in, you know, American institutions and the American people.

The American accent is a little bit tricky. We grew up with American TV shows, so we've had a lot of exposure to it and that helps, but there's little nuances and little details. Sometimes there'll be just a phrase or couple words that are really difficult to get your mouth around. At the end of every season we go over and revoice anything that has sound issues, including my kiwi accent coming out.

God forbid that the day should ever come when, in the American mind, the thought of man as a consumer shall submerge the old American thought of man as a creature of God, endowed with unalienable rights.

They didn't need to be specifically South American or Latin American. Instead we discovered we were talking about human beings in general. We realized that these are not issues only pertinent to Latin America: poverty, misery, consumerism, etc.

I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.

A dramatic unwinding of that relationship [between USA and China], by way of an aggressive trade policy, is one of the nightmare scenarios for the global economy as a whole, because it would result in a spiraling depreciation of the dollar, a surge in American interests rates, a collapse in the market for American government debt.

A more important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality.

Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don't want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.

The reason the all-American boy prefers beauty over brains is that the all-American boy can see better than he can think.

I've never been able to get it straight about what these people who are worried about the trade deficit are worried about. When they say that we're buying too much from overseas, that we're sending too many dollars overseas to get all these goods and services they got, they're saying that the American dollar is too strong and that is hurting our economy. And the result of this will be that the American dollar will get too weak, and that will hurt our economy.

I've been involved in the intelligence side of the federal government for a long time. We all know that we have to have a balance between security to protect the American people and liberty. We take an oath to protect and defend the constitution and the American people.

The American people recognize that their careers or their kids' careers are going to have to be more dynamic. That they might not be working at a single plant for 30 years. That they might have to change careers. They might have to get more education. They might have to retool or retrain. And I think the American people are game for that.

It's not just the over $8 billion that we would be saving in law enforcement; it's also the over $8 billion that we would be making by taxing marijuana... We are filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders - predominantly young, predominantly African American... It's a great beyond left and right issue. It has support across the political spectrum and also the support of the majority of the American people.

A French observer is surprised to hear how often an English or an American lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; ... This abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the English and American lawyer, this servitude of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more conservative inclinations in England and America than in France.

I personally found Donald Trump's praise for Vladimir Putin troubling or even chilling, frankly. In a room full of military veterans, to be effusing about his great leadership and how strong he is and how popular he is, while disrespecting the American president and American generals, I don't know. That was, I think, not just troubling to me, but to a lot of listeners and I think, frankly, to a lot of Republican listeners as well.

Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

I am quite aware that a distinction must be drawn between the American government and the American people.

Everyone in the world disagrees with me, including some managers, but I think managing in the American League is much more difficult for that very reason (having the designated hitter). In the National League, my situation is dictated for me. If I'm behind in the game, I've got to pinch hit. I've got to take my pitcher out. In the American League, you have to zero in. You have to know exactly when to take them out of there. In the National League, that's done for you.

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to four hundred years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

I said that Mrs Obama has been extremely supportive of American designers, but clearly we were disappointed that she chose to wear a British designer for the state dinner...From there, I was so embarrassed that I am definitely going to write to her. She has been super supportive to American designers.

The way to an American economic comeback, the way to help those out of work today find a paycheck, is to unleash the forces of job creation in America. The source of new jobs isn't going to be the bureaucracies of Washington, but rather the creativity, ingenuity, and hard work of the American people.

The fact is, some of the most respected scientific bodies in the world, including Codex Alimentarius (jointly run by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations), the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association, have stated that more research needs to be done on GMOs through premarket safety assessments before we can truthfully determine their safety.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.

The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

I think what you're seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they've got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.